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SEOUL, Korea, March 5 - After nearly six months on the run, a Korean couple was arrested last week for allowing their child to die of malnutrition even as they raised a virtual child in an online game, the Associated Press reported on March 5.
Kim Yoo-chul, forty-one, and Choi Mi-Sun, twenty-five, became unreasonably mesmerized by an online game known as Prius. (This is not to be confused with the automobile of the same name, which, although it saves on gas money and protects the environment, has been shown to have a questionable braking system, and therefore tends to smash into things with alarming regularity.)
The AP wrote: "The pair were obsessed with raising their internet child, called Anima, resulting in the neglect of their unnamed real daughter."
A Korean police officer told the local press that the couple, jobless and dispirited over having given birth to the baby prematurely, only fed the child - the barely living, barely breathing one, that is - when not at an Inter-nets cafe engaging in twelve-hour online gaming sessions.
"Online game addiction can blur the line between reality and the virtual world," Professor Kwak Dae-kyung, of Dongguk University, in Seoul, told the local press, and one is hard-pressed not to believe him: after all, as they say, if it waddles, swims and Kwaks like a Dae-kyung, then it probably is a Dae-kyung.
Child-rearing is a blessed past-time, and is just one of the many delights of holy matrimony, an institution in which some heterosexuals have so little confidence that they feel the need to legislatively protect it.
Gays and lesbians eager to tie the knot ought to take note.
A paying guest at the Best Western Albion Inn, at 27644 C. Drive North, in Albion, MI (pop. roughly 10,000), allegedly fired a gun into the bed, a window, the walls and the ceiling of his room Sunday morning.
He then surrendered to police, according to a Feb. 28 article in the Jackson Citizen-Patriot, the newspaper of record in Jackson, MI.
There is as yet no indication why the man, who is fifty-three, and whose name authorities declined to release, took such extreme action. It is not impossible that he objected to the decor in his room. An Albion Inn room (not the man's) is shown in this photo. It appears to be decorated with a green patterned carpet, a chair upholstered in colors not suitable for man or beast, and a fake wood night stand.
These sorts of embellishments are de rigueur for this type of lodging. It is a wonder only that more such rooms haven't been used for target practice, especially those featuring paintings of: a.) flying ducks; b.) a windswept sea; c.) "modern art" shapes; or d.) God and his angels.
Speaking of which, the man, who hails from Dearborn Heights, MI, left a note on the ceiling that read, "God delivered me from evil and placed me in Albion, Michigan," which, on the face of it, seems an extremely odd thing for God to do. But then, leaving a note on the ceiling seems an extremely odd thing for a human to do, so perhaps they're even.
The man was taken to the Calhoun County jail and charged with felonious assault, possession of a firearm while committing a felony, destruction of property and reckless discharge of a firearm, according to a Calhoun County Sheriff's Office release quoted in the Citizen-Patriot. In other words, they're throwin' the book at him.
An arraignment and mental evaluation are pending. In addition to firing a pistol willy-nilly about his room, the man also placed an alarm clock in the microwave and turned the oven on.
Whatever the aberrant psychological dimensions of his other acts, this seems perfectly sane and sound. Is there a human being who has awoken to the sleep-shattering sounds of an alarm clock and not wanted to bake the blasted thing in the microwave? It is regrettable only that the man didn't fire his pistol into the clock nine or ten times before incinerating it.
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